Recently I noticed a few songs, that really reminded of an artist other than the one actually performing it. I'm bad at explaining, so I'll cut to the chase right away:

Jethro Tull - Rocks on the Road might as well be written by Mark Knopfler. I've seen the whole album being compared to Dire Straits (similarly to Crest of a Knave) so that's hardly anything new. Still, this song made me pause it once to think about what makes it sound so much more like Dire Straits than Jethro Tull.

I always liked singing in high school choir even though I was never any good at it. Singing is fun! Another musical fleeting thought: There's a pop song where a woman entices a man to, "put his body on top of her." I never knew love songs were allowed to be so explicit? I guess it doesn't technically have swearing so it's A-OK.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

AngrySquirrel wrote:Why does every video on how to play bar-chords have some dude with fucking MASSIVE hands telling me that you don't need big hands or long fingers to play bar chords?

Bar chords are bullshit. Noone is able to hold down six steel guitar strings with only their index finger.

This sure seems to be the case. But then the whole "geting all five fingers into precise positions frequently having to maneuver them around each other, and doing it fast and clean enough to actually work in a musical context" thing is kind of eluding me to begin with. I don't want to just give up, but dammit, there's a reason I took to bass rather than guitar at first.

"'Legacy code' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrupwww.commodorejohn.com - in case you were wondering, which you probably weren't.

I love the show Empire. Awesome family, awesome songs and drama aplenty. The latest twist with one of their children really shocked me! And apparently love is like a drug and we need to pull the plug. Ha-ha. Brilliant. I love that show so much. Soap operas with singing are cool. :D

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

I love/hate love songs. Especially the ones about bad relationships. Breaking up songs are fun too. Especially when they trash their partner to the maximum about all their bad habits. But that's part of why I hate love songs: They get kinda perverse at times. Talking about ruining your ex-girlfriend's life for breaking up with you or whining that she wasn't "drunk enough to have sex with yet" or talking about your kinks in as explicit of detail as you can do. It's just kinda creepy and weird love song ladies and boys.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

I'm listening to all my songs on shuffle and when Sleeping on the Sidewalk started I thought it was a ZZ Top song.It's also kind of odd how long it takes for me to recognise even the artists and I've heard most of these songs many times.

Why-Why-Why-Why does G like Eminem? He's mean to women in all his relationships songs. He yells at Rhianna he's gonna, "tie her down and set her house on fire." He bragged about going number one on a woman Twice. He is a thug and a delicious-delicious rapper. I wish I could purge my Eminem lust from my head forever-and-evermore. Instead I'll just say that he's not the first white boy that tried to rap and despite my loving attentions to his awful music I still believe he's not even the best rapper around.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

somitomi wrote:I'm listening to all my songs on shuffle and when Sleeping on the Sidewalk started I thought it was a ZZ Top song.It's also kind of odd how long it takes for me to recognise even the artists and I've heard most of these songs many times.

Continuing the list of "songs that sound like some other artist", there's a Rolling Stones compilation called Through the Past, Darkly. The entire album is pretty similar in style, but I think Dandelion was playing when my mom came into the room and asked if I was listening to Beatles.

Fun fact: the Beatles and the Stones used to alternate release times for new songs so they wouldn't be competing with each other for airtime, back when they were the new hotness.

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.- Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (14 Jan 1875-1965)

Sometimes I'm listening to my songs on shuffle and a single chord plays and I can't tell whether it's going to be The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night or the Pixies' Here Comes Your Man. It's probably not that similar if you listen to them together, but out of context I can't distinguish them.

I kind of have the inverse thing going on with Tom Petty - I keep discovering that songs that seem to me to be the products of wildly disparate artists that I don't know are actually just Petty and/or the Heartbreakers.

"'Legacy code' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrupwww.commodorejohn.com - in case you were wondering, which you probably weren't.

One problem with standard musical notation is that it bakes the structure of the major scale into the stave and note names themselves. This is an advantage while playing (mostly), but it's pretty hellish if you're trying to understand patterns in music, because you're working with a system that already has some patterns, but not others, baked in and that obscures certain patterns and over-emphasises others

(I'm trying to grok the circle of fifths, which is why I'm trying myself up in knots with this)

The new Mumford and Sons album came out a while ago and I can't help thinking it sounds like Coldplay between A Rush of Blood to the Head and X&Y. Maybe it's just me and I have nothing against Colplay (I quite like them), but I feel a little disappointment. Delta doesn't seem to have the same unique feel to it that Wilder Mind still does.I do like Guiding Light a lot though (that one fits the "songs that sound like something else" list too).

Today I was listening to Wildwood Kin's cover of Foo Fighter's The Pretender. Which lead me to realize the song, which I've always though were some kind of bitter relationship song, are actually a slow burn political anthem.

It especially becomes clear in the verse:I'm the voice inside your headYou refuse to hearI'm the face that you have to faceMirrored in your stareI'm what's left, I'm what's rightI'm the enemyI'm the hand that will take you downBring you to your knees

AngrySquirrel wrote:Why does every video on how to play bar-chords have some dude with fucking MASSIVE hands telling me that you don't need big hands or long fingers to play bar chords?

Bar chords are bullshit. Noone is able to hold down six steel guitar strings with only their index finger.

This sure seems to be the case. But then the whole "geting all five fingers into precise positions frequently having to maneuver them around each other, and doing it fast and clean enough to actually work in a musical context" thing is kind of eluding me to begin with. I don't want to just give up, but dammit, there's a reason I took to bass rather than guitar at first.

Mostly I've found I only need to hold down the upper three strings. You can always not play the lowest string -- in fact that sometimes makes it easier to mix into a recording 'cause it's not fighting with the bass.The rest is about precision, kinda, but really mostly about practice. After a year I'm finally starting to get close.

Beware the sun my jabberwock. No, wait, that's not right...Well anyway beware my original music which you can find on https://soundcloud.com/snowfoxden and other places besides!

I finally, finallly picked out enough words to find that one kind of good song I hear at the store it's Falling into Space by Don Dilego kept getting stuck on not having exact wording (is it "falling through space"? "fall out into space" ) to separate it from all the other song and song related things that have "space" "fall" "satelite" etc. and my inability to google "sp-ay-ay-ace"